This is the blog of writer and musician Hank Shteamer, whom you may reach at hank.shteamer@rollingstone.com. Thanks to all visitors, and especially commenters: I read your thoughts with care, even if I typically respond only in my head.

Saturday, August 20, 2016

Pulling their weight: Why Couch Slut is heavier than metal

Couch Slut at Aviv, 8/19/16

As a fan of metal and related styles, you become pretty accustomed to music that ostensibly deals with pain, suffering, even violence but that doesn't sound particularly painful. Cannibal Corpse, for example, a band I love, actually evokes an idea of extreme achievement, of musical drive and athleticism, much more than a sense of horror and trauma. It's funny, given that they've built an entire career out of portraying actual murder, that their music takes no real human toll. It doesn't hurt to listen to it; personally, it makes me want to get up and run around and live.

I'm working through this concept because I'm trying to find a way to describe the sensation of seeing Couch Slut live. I'm far from an expert on what's going on musically day-to-day in NYC at this moment, but I would have no problem labeling them as the best band in the city right now. It's a title I would have formerly bestowed on the mighty Vaz, before they left town. These two bands share very little in common, but the area in which they do overlap is crucial: When I watch either band play, I feel, underneath a sense of exhilaration at the aggression, the command, the extremity, a sense of unease, of alarm, of "How far exactly are they going to take this?"

Couch Slut's music can take the form of frenzied, rhythmically jagged hardcore, or of leaden, thudding noise-rock, with hints of punkish black metal and swaggering riff rock poking through, but their strength as a band is not about style; it's about sensation. Whatever tempo they're playing at, their music gives me a Sisyphean feeling, a sense of grinding, methodical labor — a sense of relentless effort without payoff. A sense of "This is going to hurt us as much as it hurts you." A sense of the assumption of a great burden. A sense of extreme resignation coupled with extreme determination. Of music that asks a lot, that takes a real emotional toll rather than just alluding to that concept.

Couch Slut, in their current lineup, are operating in a very classic "three machines and a wild card' configuration. I'm talking about Led Zeppelin, the Jesus Lizard, etc., where you have an absolutely deadly, precision-engineered guitar-bass-drums band set against the presence of a singer whose job it is — and obviously the Lizard are the more apt comparison here — to essentially unravel, to flail, to purge.

Try "Little Girl Things" here (it's the first track, so you'll have to click backward) to get a sense of what I mean:

Music that is both ever-advancing and never-progressing, tension that is ever-heightening. And on the flip side, vocals that are ever-exorcising but never getting to the relief at the end of catharsis, pitched at the harrowing intersection of a scream and a sob. I don't pretend to know exactly what Megan Osztrosits is giving voice to via her performance of this music, but the song titles alone — which, on My Life as a Woman, the band's sole release so far, include "Lust Chamber," "Rape Kit" and Split Urethra Castle" — go a long way toward situating the listener in a place of degradation, despair and sexual trauma. As with the music, there is a quality of alarm inherent in paying witness to her performances. I'm a drummer more than a vocalist, but I've done my share of catharticscreaming, and the sense I have is that you don't tap into anguish as profound as that which Osztrosits summons without revisiting some kind of private hell.

As at last night's outstanding show at Aviv, an intimate, great-sounding venue on the Greenpoint/Bushwick border, Osztrosits tends to spend most of Couch Slut's live sets standing on the floor in front of the stage, getting right down into the mix, breaking the fourth wall in a purposeful way. Each line she howls is another mini mission of despair, sometimes accompanied by a hoisted, spewing beer can. She slams the microphone into her face or legs. She leans into each sentiment with the force of involuntary convulsion.

Meanwhile, the musicians behind her — I know their names, but they seem to favor quasi-anonymity online, so I'll respect that — operate with grim determination. The cliché of "It's a dirty job but someone's gotta do it" seems to apply here. A sense of repetitive, churning labor, yes, but coupled with — and this element seems to have increased in prominence in the year or so, and this makes the Lizard and Zeppelin comparisons seem even more apt to me — a quality of true old-school rawk nastiness. If you took AC/DC and re-deployed their supple groove and hip-shaking swing in the service of harrowing pain rather than easy pleasure, you might have something like Couch Slut. Their music moves with a rare kind of looseness, even as it's advancing toward you like a tank — or, maybe, considering the aura of sordid, noxious nastiness that envelops this band and its listener, like projectile vomit in slo-mo.

The takeaway here — for me, at least — is that "metal," or what have you, is no guarantee of anything, in terms of actual affect. What I seem to be looking for these days — and have been looking for ever since I can remember, really — is music that antes up emotionally, Crowbar being an almost comically extreme example. Couch Slut doesn't just co-opt or shallowly depict pain, they convey it. And I mean that in the sense of "to express," but also of "to carry." A great burden (aesthetic, emotional, physical) is being shouldered, by all four members, when this band takes the stage. And if you value so-called extreme music, of whatever flavor, you owe it to yourself to be there next time to pay witness – as it were, to pull your weight.

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*Here's a fairly recent live video. (Disclaimer: As with all truly great bands, any recording or representation of Couch Slut is almost an insult to their overwhelming power as an in-the-flesh performing entity.)

*Bbigpigg — proudly carrying on the legacy of the late, lamented Drayton Sawyer Gang, two of whose former members play in this band — and Multicult — whose sound resembles a tightened, sped-up Shellac with all conceivable musical excess trimmed out — also played last night. Both were pulverizing and great.